Lessons, Lessons

[evilhippo]

There are wonderful things about writing classes. One of them is not being torn a new one, despite the fact that you rather expect it. Now, I'm sure there are bloody splashes of red pen all over my draft copies, once I get to going through those, but I got my stupid grinning over with reading the general comments over dinner. (I think I've come to accept that I'm a complete nutter, even in public.) I think I also realized that whatever pirate I was writing about wasn't Pirate!Hughes at all, because he's got a bit too much writing experience under his belt... and Pirate!Hughes couldn't write. Which means this guy has gone and stolen P!Hughes' Gracia! (Except there is no port of Royale in P!Hughes' world, as far as I know. Nor is this guy's love interest named Gracia.) Now I'm left wondering where on Earth I'm going with that story, though... because lots of people in the class wanted to know where it was going. Even though the style lost them in parts (which I need to fix anyway). I also need to do research. And I still also have an urge to work out the finer points of the story I just turned in today, because that's the first story in a while that's gotten me to ten pages without an real end in sight. I've decided that, for now, I'm allowed to be somewhat derivative as long as I'm also taking risks, because technically I'm still within the first few years of writing seriously. (Goodness knows I did a lot of writing before, but most of it was, well, either Sue-ish or in script format. And wonderfully embarassing. Occasionally both.)

Right now, though, I'm just going to be happy that I got good comments from a room full of rather good writers (even if most of the time I didn't agree with their subject matter). (You know, a few days ago one of my roomies handed me the stuff from her beginning fiction class that people had been writing... and though in general they were writing things on a greater variety of stuff, it really made me realize that my class is full of freaking good writers. Even if sometimes I don't care for their stories. Gives me a better reason to be jealous of them. Plus they're eleventy billion times more likely to get published. Everything I've complained about this quarter has been story-wise. Save for the one story that wasn't spell-checked. I'm going to take that as a mark of good writing. And I know it's going to hit summer and I'm going to end up all nostalgic for this class, as completely and utterly bipolar as it's been. Today, for some reason, everyone was just slaphappy. We were making some sort of disorganized attempt at listing the entire range of human emotions on the board, and somehow the phrase "pickled fetus" was brought up, and then we were working on characters, at which point someone concocted a lustful "ladies' manslut" who "caught an STD. Or fell off a polo horse or something, I don't know." I think it's a consequence of it being near the end of the quarter, and everyone being a little off on things in general. Good thing we've got a long weekend.)